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The Living Camera
with the Aga Khan.
Karim Aga Khan.
The Living Camera was with him for six months
in the Swiss Alps, Normandy, Paris, the Riviera, and Africa.
This is Africa, an Ismaili Muslim mosque,
center of the Aga Khan's spiritual empire.
He is the direct blood descendant of Muhammad.
He is the Imam or king of the Ismaili Muslims.
He is responsible to Allah and to his people,
and to the memory of two extraordinary men
whose influence is shaping his life.
His father, Aly Khan, famous as a dashing sportsman
and connoisseur of the western world.
His grandfather, the old Aga Khan,
a rich, powerful Imam as wise as a sultan
in the ways of the east.
Karim Aga Khan was still a student at Harvard
when his grandfather died,
passing over his son Aly to hand the imamate
to his grandson Karim, only 20 years old.
Then Aly was killed in an accident,
and Karim was alone,
living up to the two men in the several worlds
haunted by their memories, being the wise Imam of the east,
the dashing sportsman of the west.
The Living Camera met the Aga Khan
at a ski resort in the Alps
and followed him through the European world
of his father before moving on to Africa
and the Muslim world of his grandfather.
Aly Khan liked to ski here for pleasure only.
The Aga Khan, called Karim by his Western friends,
is skiing in competition.
He is in training for two big races
about to be held one week apart.
His father Aly excelled at racing and breeding horses.
Karim is trying to excel in ski racing
in the European Olympic class
against the greatest skiers in the world.
But right now serious training must wait.
Karim is headed for the town in the valley below
for another reason altogether.
Traveling up the mountain, the car brings visitors,
nearing the end of a 4,000 mile journey.
These men have come from Africa.
They are the leaders of the Ismaili communities
and businesses in Kenya and Uganda.
These are some of the most powerful
and influential Muslims in the world,
the Supreme Council of the Ismailis.
They are devout men.
Any words from the Aga Khan are considered divine,
and even the mildest words of displeasure
can be deeply troubling to them.
So it seems to me, and this is something
which you're going to have to discuss,
that we have a choice of two things:
either changing directors fairly rapidly,
which may cause harm to the company,
or to both of them, or otherwise letting
the present directors continue
but asking them to accept
the advice of the people.
Many of the directors have got very, very heavy loans.
Now this is something which I find,
personally, very surprising.
I don't know how you grant loans to directors
after the main recommendation in the Freeman Report,
which you yourselves asked for, was that no more loans
should be given to directors, or that at least this
should be curtailed.
So I think that first of all you should tell me
how you envisage that we should put these
two companies in line.
One thing is to draft a change.
Count Lakha, an industrialist from Uganda.
Sir Eboo Pirbhai of Kenya,
President of the Supreme Council.
These are all rich and powerful men.
The Aga Khan is 25 years old.
Most of these men belong to his grandfather's generation,
and they served and loved the old Aga Khan well.
Karim's grandfather was the 48th Imam
in an unbroken succession of Imams stretching back
through 1,400 years of history
to the Prophet Muhammad.
In the seventh century, Muhammadanism grew out of Mecca
and spread over Africa and Asia.
Two hundred years later, the Ismaili sect
of the religion was formed, and it too spread
into 21 countries.
It grew to 15 million Muslims, an empire,
united by the Imam, his spirit, and fortune.
Karim's grandfather ruled 70 years.
He transferred Ismaili communities into East Africa,
and guided them to great wealth.
On ceremonial birthdays, they weighed him
in gold and diamonds, fortunes from which
he founded businesses and trust funds
for their welfare.
Now that welfare is in the hands of Karim.
He's trying to reorganize the businesses
of the Ismailis to survive changes taking place in Africa.
He has already told the council members to clean house
and now they hear from the European business advisors..
Karim has called in, a plan to shift
their trading businesses into new industry for Africa.
Question which at a glance is really fairly basic
for the directors is this: after the initial six months,
the final decision must be taken if we wish to create
this company, but at least from the information we have
at our disposition now, this company is
an absolute necessity and should be created.
Oui?
Oui?
Merci beaucoup, merci.
The Supreme Council in India in the Agra area,
which is a report.
The Supreme Council for Uganda.
A private report from an Ismaili.
Then Women's Association's report,
then the information bulletin from Ruanda-Urundi,
which is important to go through,
and then more individual letters,
a small book on the life of Muhammad.
You have mentioned 25 shillings, which of course increases
the total sum considerably.
You have also mentioned, however, the the profits are
about 50,000 pounds greater per year
and I'm wondering whether you feel that there is
that there has been a change in the value
of the standard shares since Jim left Nairobi.
This morning Karim will enter the first of two
Giant Slalom ski races.
With him is his trainer, Hans Senger,
a former champion, who has undertaken
a four-year project to try to make Karim a champion.
But Karim has not been able to devote full time to training
and his competition will be Olympic class skiers
from all over the world.
Karim and Hans are going to inspect the course,
a Giant Slalom marked by a series of flagged gates
up the steep mountainside.
Racers speed down through the gates
up to 60 miles per hour, so fast they could fly off
the course unless they inspect the gates beforehand
and carefully plan a racing strategy.
Up on the mountain, it's snowing.
Because you have to swing anyway here.
You have to make a little, you know?
The course plunges down through 70 gates,
and Karim must memorize them all.
The blue one, you have to get it fairly high.
Right.
And you get three open gates.
Yeah.
Not bad.
I'm always subject to much more--yeah?
Ah, thank you.
Oh, it's the same as this.
I'm much more subject to comment and photographers
and it's very difficult to really, at the start of a race,
if you have a whole mob of people around you
to really concentrate and to remember the course.
It's hard enough without that.
I find that's quite a strain.
You're really alone in nature.
Nature can be pretty tough
and it's the toughness of the mountains which I like.
Often in the early winter skiing,
it's very, very hard, and there are times
when you don't want to ski
and when you start on a difficult downhill,
it takes quite a lot of energy and guts to go down.
A number of people sort of say, well, why did I start racing
and I'll never get to the top or anything.
Well, the point isn't getting to the top.
The point is making an improvement
and it's a very tough battle to even get into
the international ski racing class
and you can learn so much just by skiing with them
and watching them, and if you make
a little bit of improvement,
that's already in comparison
to where they are themselves,
it's a wonderful thing.
There are hardly any racers in the races that I did
in Solothurn and Sursee, who hadn't been racing
for five years.
Well, with me it's my second season of racing.
Karim will start 37th.
Number one is off.
Number eight is starting.
He is Gerhard Nenning, a top Austrian champion.
If you're in a good racing mood, you get sick of waiting
for the other people to go.
You want to go and get on the course,
and have your race.
You watch the course to see whether that's getting eaten up,
and what the conditions are
and you're listening to the time.
You watch where you see racers have trouble.
You can watch three or four racers go through a gate
and when the course is set, it will look
an impossible gate to get
and when you see the top skiers go through it,
they may go through just fantastically smoothly.
If you watch the line they take,
may be a gate of no difficulty at all.
And another one which will look very, very easy
will be an impossible gate in the race.
Nenning.
-Nenning, Gerhard. -Nenning, Gerhard.
A new record; Nenning has made it in two minutes,
thirteen and one-tenth seconds.
Two minutes, fifteen seconds.
Two-seventeen point four.
Two-fifty.
Two minutes, fourteen point six.
Prince Aga Khan.
Karim's time is two minutes,
thirty-one and two-tenths seconds,
eighteen and one-tenth seconds behind Nenning.
Karim places 52nd out of 65.
I'm much more subject to comment and photographers,
and it's very difficult if you have a whole mob
of people around you to really concentrate.
It's hard enough without that.
The Riviera.
This was Aly's house, Château de l'Horizon.
Château of the Horizon.
Louise?
The Château of the Horizon is kept fully staffed
but it is empty except for Karim's occasional visits.
This is one of the 10 houses Karim maintains
around the world.
Like all of them, it is filled with personal mementos,
pictures, and memories of his father
and his grandfather.
But it is Aly's memory that dominates
the Château of the Horizon.
Aly held a magnetic charm and fascination
for beautiful women, and the compliment
was returned on a grand scale.
Karim's mother was Aly's first wife,
but the marriage didn't last.
Then in 1949, his famous romance with Rita Hayworth.
They were married at the Château of the Horizon.
Karim was there.
Four years later, divorce.
And then the acknowledged great love of his life,
the Parisian model Bettina.
And she shared with Aly the greatest of all his loves,
horses.
Oh, Louise?
I'll leave you to yourselves for just a second.
Karim is packing for a trip.
He must go back to the Alps for the second ski race.
But first he will go to Normandy and Paris
to inspect two of the ten horse farms left to him by Aly.
Louise?
Aly Khan's success with horses was phenomenal.
He was Europe's outstanding breeder and racer
for two decades, and the bloodlines he built up..
swept most of the great races of the world.
He managed an establishment of stables and farms
stretching through Northern France
and into Ireland, an imposing establishment
for anyone to try to take over.
The papers here in Europe made a lot of hullabaloo
because I didn't say immediately that I was going
to take on the horse racing establishment.
The reason that I hesitated was that I knew
the amount of work I had to do for the community,
and in my role as Imam.
I had to take the choice of taking
the horse racing institution on and trying to make it
a success as it had been always in the past,
or taking it on and having the danger of it
going down the drain, slowly but surely.
I don't think that anyone could claim really
to be as great a horseman as my father.
A training farm outside Paris, the heart of Aly's world.
Madame Vuillier, the expert horse breeder
who ran the stud farms under Aly's guidance.
Alec Head, Aly's expert in horse training.
I received the first report on Tyburn from the vet
but not the second one.
What happened?
He must have tossed himself in the box here.
A statue of Aly as a young boy.
Aly Khan's expertness in breeding and training
added up to an incredible string of racing victories.
A natural horseman and competitor,
he often rode his own horses
and personally won more than 100 races.
Karim will inspect some of his trainer's work,
then go on to Paris to watch one of his horses race.
They're gonna work on the
On the grass, yeah.
We just watch these go by, and then we can walk across.
See that silver leopard,
he's a bit of a handful.
Do you hear him squeal?
You see?
But there, they go out quietly,
but if they go galloping, he'd walk out.
He'd still go at that speed.
Yes, he goes at that speed.
Not so good.
You're gonna have to use your legs instead of a whip, huh?
Yes.
Whatever you do, get him balanced.
Whatever happens, have him balanced
because if you're unbalanced in the first two furlongs,
you can start a climb, and he'll never get galloping.
That's true.
It looks like when he went in the turn,
he dropped out and he's come back
and finished well.
Not bad.
Third, not that bad.
Aly was a great horseman,
a less expert skier.
Karim picked it up the other way around
but with the same determination to excel in skiing
that his father had brought to horse racing.
Now Karim is on his way back to the Alps
for another ski race.
Driving a Maserati, 95 in 4th, and another gear to go.
Aly Khan liked fast cars.
In May 1960, he was killed in a head-on crash.
In the Alps, it has been snowing
for three days and nights.
Heavy, wet snow, and there is ice under the snow.
Visibility is low.
Conditions for racing are dangerous.
Up the ski lift in a storm,
conditions are so hazardous, the race could be called off.
It might clear up though.
But Hans is pretty severe.
I mean, he doesn't want me to do a downhill,
which he feels I really can't handle,
and I also have a problem with the risk.
I can't take a really big risk.
But if a skier lands badly on a fall
and he breaks his back or he may be paralyzed for life,
and there's nothing that the physician
could do to that.
The race is underway.
The 11th skier has started down.
Karim will start 54th.
He doesn't want me to do a downhill,
which he feels I really can't handle.
They can't guarantee that there isn't
a danger of death on the course.
You're really alone in nature.
Nature can be pretty tough,
and often it's very, very hard,
and there are times when you don't want to ski,
and when you start on a difficult downhill,
it takes quite a lot of energy and guts to go down.
Karim is next.
Half the racers have fallen out and failed to finish.
Karim finishes 48th out of 95.
The first half, I have no trouble,
and I was very happy, and I thought--
because it was a cut-up course and the visibility was bad.
Then for some reason, I don't know whether it's
lack of experience, we talked about it up there with Hans,
about the middle of the race, everything just breaks up.
My concentration, my confidence,
the fighting, everything, and I don't know what it is.
I've taken on a lot of his loves.
His horse racing, his houses.
This is bound to affect you, you know?
You're living with something
which is a permanent remembrance of a person.
He was never a father, really.
He was much more an elder brother to me.
My grandfather was a father to me.
In my work, I'm living with a permanent
remembrance of my grandfather.
The Aga Khan is flying into the world of his grandfather,
the Muslim East of the Ismaili Empire in Africa.
Five years earlier, he had arrived in Africa with Aly.
The old Aga Khan had just died
and passing over Aly, had named Karim the Imam.
On the bank of the River Nile,
the new Imam helped carry the body of the old Imam
to its holy resting place.
Karim was 20 years old when the immense responsibilities
descended on his shoulders
to administrate the huge fortune of the Aga Khan,
to guide the communities
and to provide the spiritual link
between 15 million devout Muslims and their God.
After the funeral, the new Aga Khan
attended a series of vast public investiture ceremonies.
From Morocco to India, he traveled the Ismaili world.
The process took 18 months.
He had become the 49th Imam.
The Aga Khan is flying into Nairobi, Kenya,
in Africa, center of the most prosperous Ismaili community.
Here in Nairobi, the Aga Khan must prepare the Ismailis
for the changeover to African rule.
Sir Eboo is in charge of the welcoming ceremony.
Six months have passed since the Supreme Council met
with the Aga Khan at the ski lodge in the Alps.
Now he is coming to meet with them again
on his project to reorganize their businesses.
The Ismailis salute the Aga Khan
with a personal anthem written for his grandfather.
As the leader of their religion,
the Aga Khan will go to the mosques
of the Ismailis
to give them the spiritual communion
that only his presence can evoke.
In his public role,
he will meet African political leaders
and visit schools and hospitals
built with his trust funds.
His Highness the Aga Khan High School.
-I came here this morning. -Yes.
And he was so enthusiastic about it.
So enthusiastic.
How do you like it here?
Very much.
Very much?
Are you finding it difficult?
Do you read a lot?
I do.
The Aga Khan Platinum Jubilee Hospital.
He'll be going out again shortly.
Will he?
from Nairobi.
You come from Nairobi?
And it will be all right?
He'll be all right.
I hope everything goes well.
Karim grew up in Kenya.
With his mother and younger brother,
he spent the war years in this house.
When you come back to this place,
does it give you lots of memories?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
Next door, I was operated on for tonsils and adenoids.
I spent five years in this bed.
I remember the house as if it was yesterday.
And at the end of the patio,
we had a little wooden doll's house.
And the room next door used to be
my brother's and my nursery.
My mother used to live upstairs where I am now.
It was a long time ago
but I still have pictures of it and everything.
During the war?
Yes, during the war.
I think I ought to see my people because otherwise
It's getting to be rather late.
Eboo?
Can you ask the council members to come in?
They're all outside.
All right.
Jomo Kenyatta,
the foremost political leader in Kenya.
How are you? How are you?
Very, very nice.
To see you again, you look so well.
Thank you.
You look more anxious than ever.
How you been keeping?
That's right, that's right, that's right.
You are coming to Uganda?
Yes, I'm-- matter of fact,
I'm going today.
The Supreme Council is gathering.
Good morning, gentlemen.
All the way down here.
The Aga Khan's European advisors
are back with a completed plan
to form the new industrial companies.
Your Highness, gentlemen,
we have now finished the report
on the Jubilee Insurance Company
that is available for study.
I think it should be studied by all the directors in detail.
It is, I think, a very comprehensive report
containing a complete set of recommendations
for the changes necessary.
So, that is a report on the Jubilee Insurance Company.
The report on the Diamond Trust will be forthcoming
within four to five weeks.
All right, well, I think you could do
a little bit of homework,
and this isn't a very long report.
Try and read it and discuss it.
Now, the main problem that worries me
about the IPS in particular is I don't feel
that we should delay our decision for too long.
Once we have our reports about the insurance
and the investment companies made,
I would like to be able to take a decision
as quickly as possible.
The Aga Khan is leaving to visit an Ismaili family.
Will we be late?
This is the home of Count Lakha.
The old Aga Khan used to visit Count Lakha
and his considerable family.
Inside?
Sitting where his grandfather sat,
the young Aga Khan must counsel
in personal and family and religious matters.
One of the Count's young nephews
is brought forward by his father
for advice on a career.
Yes, I have seen Dr. Campbell as well as Dr. Wolf.
They were quite confident.
I think you have to think now, what is the decision
for him to take which will make him happy.
Maybe they may have something in their minds
to say what they feel, then we can follow him.
I don't want him to make a precedent on that.
Oh, he will be, I think-- you know, he will be--
every time, five to twenty-five percent better
than the old grandfather.
We can see from now.
It's a lonely thing, I wasn't expected to do this.
I mean, except that...
It's strange, you're lonely, and you're not at all lonely.
You have such support,
so many people who are watching,
and whenever you ask for anything,
they certainly will try to help, you know?
In that way, it's not lonely at all.
It's very difficult, and at the same time,
very inspiring.
You inspire them, what inspires you?
Well, my religion, of course.
This is the first thing.
And I think for many Muslims, that's the case today.
Do you see your role changing?
Probably, probably.
-I think so. -How?
Well, I think Islam in general is changing at the moment
because we have to deal more and more with the West.
This is one of the very, very big difficulties
we've faced all along.
All our scholars are getting their education in the West
and we are always having to work against a background
which is not Islamic.
"We have to deal more and more with the West."
Karim stared at us out of the East.
This had taken us six months to realize.
Finally, we could see him answering
not to his father's memory
or even to his grandfather's alone
but back through that long line of Imams,
1,400 years of family kinship to the Prophet Muhammad,
answering to a religious spirit of the East.
As we approached the center
of the Aga Khan's spiritual world,
his people exalted him as divine.
Something was happening that no westerner could follow,
not even a friend of the Aga Khan.
There, at a mosque in Africa,
Karim left us.